Spirited away
March 19, 2012 - 2:47PM
Most horror stories begin ordinarily enough - the comfortable home, the happy family, the loving couple. And so it was with Nathan Zamprogno, who in 2008 was living with his wife, Kylie, and their five-year-old son, Liam, in Richmond, a small town at the foot of the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. Nathan and Kylie had met as teenagers in a local church group, and had been married almost 10 years. He was 35; she was 33. They drove a station wagon and played soccer on Saturdays. Nathan worked nearby, at Wycliffe Christian School, where he was the IT specialist; Kylie, who had studied nursing, was waiting to start at Nepean Hospital as an administrator in the emergency department. ...
Above all, he is an optimist. He is the first to admit, for example, that his marriage wasn't perfect. Kylie suffered regular bouts of mental illness, including postnatal depression in 2002. Despite being close to her mother, who lived a short drive away in the Blue Mountains, she often felt lonely. She suffered a breakdown in 2004, then another in 2006, when she threatened self-harm, and, according to Nathan, falsely claimed to have swallowed two packets of Panadol.
"Yet, with the help of family and friends, Kylie always got better," he says. Indeed, the couple had even decided to try for more children and had extended their mortgage to renovate the house.
In April 2008, with her job at Nepean Hospital yet to start, Kylie found work on the front desk at Wycliffe Christian School, where she met an older woman called Virginnia Donges. Donges, a mother of six, had worked as the school's first aid officer, and was well known in the community. One day she invited Kylie to join a Bible study group, weekly meetings of which were held at members' houses in the Blue Mountains. "Kylie wasn't a lady who made friends easily," says Nathan, "so I was pleased."
Soon the meetings began to run later and later. Kylie would often stay out past midnight, without any explanation. Sometimes she wouldn't come home at all. When Nathan tried to call her, he would receive a text message, usually from Donges, saying that Kylie would "be home in the morning".
Nathan became increasingly worried: Kylie had been anxious about her new job, and had been showing signs of another depressive episode. But he was unsure what to do. "Kylie would take our only car, and I had a five-year-old in bed," he says. "I couldn't just take off after her." Besides, he told himself that she was in good hands: he knew Donges from her work at the school, and the group's other members seemed equally reputable.
On January 4, 2009, however, Kylie left for another meeting, telling Nathan she would be back for dinner. Liam and Nathan waved her off. "She never came back," he says.
When Kylie had been gone for three days, Nathan, with Liam in tow, visited Donges' home in Faulconbridge, in the Blue Mountains, where she lived with her husband, Wayne. There they found Kylie sitting, according to Nathan, "mute and unresponsive", in the lounge room. "Liam ran into her arms, but she was catatonic. In the end he just played Lego at her feet for two hours."
Donges, meanwhile, assumed the air of a hospital matron. "She looked at me very seriously and said, 'Nathan, you have no idea what we've been going through.'?" Apparently, Donges had been "counselling" Kylie for the most horrific child abuse, memories of which had come to light only after months of gruelling "therapy". Kylie, it seemed, had been raped and subjected to ritual Satanic abuse. She had, as a small girl, been taken from her bed by hooded figures and forced to witness murders. She had had boiling water poured in her ear, and been kept under the house and fed like a dog.
Not all of this was news to Nathan. Kylie had in the past spun wild stories about having participated in a murder, being raped and having an abortion. (She later retracted these claims.) But what Donges said next went one step further: as a way of coping with her abuse, Kylie had developed dissociative identity disorder (DID), and was now harbouring hundreds of separate identities, or "alters", the most dominant of which was a six-year-old girl named Hope, who sucked her thumb and had to be put to bed with a teddy.
From Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to the 1976 film Sybil, DID, or multiple personality disorder, has become one of the most storied and controversial of all diagnoses. Springing in part from Sigmund Freud's theory of repression, DID is characterised by the presence of two or more identities that manifest recurrently to take control of the subject's behaviour. Each identity exists in isolation and without knowledge of the other, each sequestering memories of events too painful to bear. Reports of "multiple personalities" go back centuries: such behaviour was often attributed to demonic possession.
These days, many psychiatrists doubt that DID exists. Others suspect it is predominantly "iatrogenic", or brought about by its own treatment, which often comes in the form of recovered-memory therapy. "Recovered-memory therapy is when a counsellor leads the patient back to their other identity," says Don Thomson, professor of psychology at Deakin University in Melbourne. "When they arrive at that identity, they will be able to recall details of the initial trauma, which can then be properly processed."
Recovered-memory therapy is even more controversial than DID. In the 1990s it was implicated in a spate of court cases, both here and overseas, where victims recalled suffering incidents of child sex abuse, usually at the hands of their parents, that were later shown to have never occurred. "It's surprisingly easy to suggest false memories," says Thomson. "There's clear evidence that people who are emotionally distressed, when placed in an environment where they feel supported, are highly suggestible."
For this reason, experts recommend caution when dealing with recovered-memory therapy and DID. Yet when Nathan asked Donges how she had arrived at her diagnosis, he says she told him, "Spiritual discernment." (Neither Kylie nor Donges would be interviewed for this story.)
"At that stage, I said, 'Look, Kylie has to come with me, she's sick.' But they wouldn't allow it," says Nathan. "When we left, Liam waved his arms in her face and said, 'Mummy, Mummy, please talk to me. Why won't you talk to me?' But Kylie just sat there."
Over the following year, Nathan tried everything to get Kylie back; he called, he emailed, he wrote letters. He visited Donges's home, into which Kylie had moved. He went to the police, who told him they were powerless. He consulted Kylie's parents and siblings, whom she had also disowned. (Kylie was supposed to be a maid of honour at the wedding of her younger sister, Briony, in February 2009, but never showed up.) On Christmas Day, 2009, Nathan called Kylie and pleaded with her. "I said, 'Where are you? We miss you.' She said, 'I'm with my real family now.'?"
Kylie had long since lost her job at Nepean Hospital and assumed the name Hope - that of her six-year-old "alter". She had also been seen by a Blue Mountains psychiatrist, who after just two sessions confirmed a diagnosis of DID. In 2010, Kylie signed an enduring power of guardianship, giving the "Bible study group" the right to make medical decisions on her behalf.
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/spirite ... -1utb6.htm